[Every other week, Gamasutra examines the fastest-growing Facebook games according to monthly active users, looking at which titles and developers are having the most success attracting new players on the social network.]

A month after launching, Zynga's The Ville is finally taking off -- likely with the help of increased cross-promotion efforts on the company's enormous user network -- picking up nearly all of its 16.1 million active users in just the last seven days.

Just like that, The Ville is now the ninth most popular game in terms of monthly active users on Facebook, and is on track to becoming another one of the company's enduring hits, like CityVille and FarmVille (though analysts worry that the developer's core games are in decline).

The Ville seems more than a little inspired by popular series The Sims, and though that Electronic Arts/Maxis series also has a Facebook game, Zynga's release already has more players than the nearly one-year-old The Sims Social (15.8 million users).

EA's adaptation of its long-running city-building series SimCity Social, though, has also been doing well on Facebook -- it's the second fastest-growing game on the social network after picking up 2 million users for a 7.1 million total. That's still far from CityVille's 23.2 million players, but Zynga's game has been shedding millions of users each week recently.

The full list of the top 20 fastest growing Facebook games along with exact monthly active user counts, are as follows:

All charts and data are courtesy of Facebook application metrics and trends site AppData.